Jon Udell was at A2B3 Sept 27, 2012, talking about his elmcity project, a calendar aggregater he is working on. He has a list of 300+calendar feeds for the Ann Arbor area… and that doesn’t include calendars from annarbor.com, Ann Arbor Observer, Ann Arbor SPARK, etc. He is doing a Google Fiber type search for a demonstration city. I think Ann Arbor would be perfect.

We discussed some enhancements to make the elmcity project more useful, keyword/tag filtering, geo-coding, etc. One problem I noticed was that you can’t go back even one day to review recent events.

Until we get an aggregated community calendar fully in place like the one Jon is promoting, one would have to subscribe to many calendars to know what events are happening in the community. For a glimpse of what it might look like check out the Ann Arbor Chronicle’s Ann Arbor events listing.

“Federal agencies have until the end of 2019 to adopt systems that store and manage all electronic records in formats that will keep them safe and searchable for future generations, according to a White House directive released Friday.” [more] (from Nextgov via Mashable 8/24/2012)

“The principles of openness and universal access that underpinned the creation of the internet three decades ago are under greater threat than ever, according to Google co-founder Sergey Brin.” (from 4/15/2012 The Guardian)

Supporters of a free and open internet rallied to oppose SOPA and PIPA… most notably with the largest online protest in history and with a blackout day to raise the public’s awareness of the flawed legislation. The result is that passage of SOPA and PIPA has been indefinitely postponed.

That is not to say that another set of similarly flawed legislation will reappear in the future, so be prepared.

Among the actions in the U.S. National Action Plan announced by President Obama is an effort under the U.S.-India Strategic Dialogue to produce “Data.gov-in-a-Box,” an open source version of the United States’ Data.gov data portal and India’s India.gov.in document portal. The U.S. and India are working together to produce an open source version available for implementation by countries globally, encouraging governments around the word to stand up open data sites that promote transparency, improve citizen engagement, and engage application developers in continuously improving these efforts. Technical teams from the governments of the U.S. and India have been working together since August of this year, with a planned launch of a complete open source product (which is now called the Open Government Platform (OGPL) to reflect its broad scope) in early 2012. Find out more about the evolution of this project from the U.S. Chief Information Officer and Chief Technology Officer.

This is really great news for those of us who want more transparency and effectiveness in government.

March 2011 TEDx-Waterloo Talk by Michael Nielson (posted Nov 2011) advocates for scientists to more openly share their data. It is his belief that “any publicly funded science should be open science” … in order to more quickly solve problems in new ways. He goes on to say “… the single most important thing that we can do to give impetus to ‘open science’ is create a general awareness amongst the population of the issue of ‘open science’ and of it’s critical importance.”

How important? Consider the example mentioned in Edward Tenner‘s March 2011 TED Talk on how the U.S. forced such open sharing of data among researchers in WWII to quickly solve the problem of producing massive amounts of penillicin. There are scores of other problems that would benefit from “open science”.

Getting back to the Nielson TEDx Talk, he relates how Galileo hid his research in anagrams and cyphers (like others did in his time) to prevent others from taking credit. We got a glimpse of Galileo’s notes and methods during at the February 2009 Ignite Ann Arbor talk by University of Michigan Special Collections librarian Peggy Daub.

Galileo’s decision to more openly share his telescope discoveries surely prompted others to do the same. One wonders how much less knowledge we would have today if they had continued to keep their discoveries more sequestered.